I watched some of Apple’s recent shows using…different methods than the official app and I believe they’re making some of the best content out there, currently. Shows like Severance and For All Mankind are masterpieces and they give me the SciFi fix I desperately needed.
So I’ve decided to bite the bullet and get a subscription - after all, you should support the creators you’re really invested in, right?
Watching content on their platform is so painful - it’s one of the worst experiences I ever had. If you want to watch the shows in a browser, you need to use Microsoft Edge on Windows because that’s the only browser which comes with Playwright DRM - and it only works if you have a HDCP 2.2-capable screen. If you don’t have that, the content gets served in 480p with a low bitrate. Might as well just put in a VHS at this point.
There’s another alternative: The official Windows 11 app you can get from the store. It is indeed capable of serving you UHD streams…if it wants to. All episodes that are age-rated to 16+ currently don’t work, because they forgot to implement an age verification mechanism and pressing play doesn’t do anything at all. According to their forums, that even seems to happen on MacOS in some cases, so they really messed up the most important thing of their own streaming platform: Pressing Play to watch an episode.
Even if you’re lucky and you’re watching a show that isn’t age-restricted, they serve the content in the language your Apple account has been set to when you’ve created it by default. So every time you open an episode, you have to start it and switch the audio to English. If you go to your account settings to change the language it tells you that your subscription needs to end before you can do that. So you have to wait four weeks or a whole year to change the default language, depending on the subscription model.
Adding to that, sometimes the video streams just freeze, the audio doesn’t play at all or the app straightup crashes in the middle of a stream.
I have rarely seen a platform messing up the user experience this badly. It’s as if Apple doesn’t even want you to watch their own content. I’ve decided to not renew my subscription and procure the episodes from other sources. I wanted to give you money, Apple. But you fucked up.
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Watching it on Apple TV hardware was always simplicity. Very high quality on my OLED.
I know this isnt what you want to hear, but it’s actually one of the better apps on my smart tv. It works pretty smoothly, and video seeking (fast forward/rewind) actually works well, which is a main criteria for me. The Max app, on the other hand, is dog shit.
It used to be the worst app because Netflix was so damn good. Then Netflix took a shit all over their user experience and jacked prices to the tits so we cancelled them. And HBO got bought by Time Warner who is actively antagonistic towards streaming because the CEO just looks at their entire catalog as a tax writeoff - so the max app is fucking dreadful.
Then Apple decided to make things suck less and they succeeded. The one thing they screwed up is there is no way to disable that obnoxious auto-play bullshit at the end of each episode. All of the other apps are now so bad that we exclusively subscribe through the appletv app. My wife likes giving money to paramount for some reason - but at least if we do it through the apple app there are no ads.
I didn’t even know they had a Smart TV app. What TV are you using?
Any TV made in the last few years, all Google TVs at least and LG WebOS
I have a roku TCL which works.
I have a big 2012 Samsung screen which is still surprisingly good, with a Roku stick in it. Works just fine. I hope it never dies.
It’s just an app on my tv I open and it worked right away.
My only issue I’ve had is that on my Android phone I can’t Chromecast the episodes. It won’t let you. So even though I had a subscription I still needed yo pirate the episodes so my friends could all watch it in a group on their TV.
My interest waned with the apple tv and its pos remote. Every update, on every app needed to have a password prompt.
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Been running an AppleTV HD for two years, and I’ve never had to reinput my password, nor have I had any other issues with it. I charge the remote battery maybe twice a year, and everything just works, faster and smoother than any onboard smart tv os I’ve ever used.
Yeah idk my Apple TVs have been hands down the best set top boxes of any that I’ve tried.
I’ve ran into the apple hate crowd plenty of times. I don’t think they’re any kind of tech paragon, but my household includes the Apple TV, three HomePods, two iPhones and MacBook Air and all of them work together seamlessly.
My main PC is running EndeavourOS and hyprland, so at least there’s no windows in the house.
I used to be part of the anti Apple club.
I have tux tattooed on my chest, literally.
Tech tribalism (the Apple hate club) is dumb generally.
Hating on a trillion dollar company is never dumb 🙂
This reminds me of a gripe with LG WebOS, they dont require sign in or passwords to update the big apps but if you want to update plex you have to sign in. Pure bullshit.
Honestly the UI in the official apps is atrocious too. For one, I find it so difficult just to get to a show’s season page to pick the next episode.
The only thing Apple ever got right was the iPhone. All their other software and services are shit.
The Xcode + developer network + App Store publishing is complete garbage. MacOS isn’t all that great either, at least if you come from a Linux background.
Mac OS is better than windows IMO. I use it for work but use Linux for my personal computers.
Well yeah, but being better than windows isn’t saying much.
Using firefox on windows 10 and I have none of these issues. Maybe windows 11 is what breaks it?
Maybe you’re not noticing the drop in resolution? They’re definitely not delivering their content in UHD, but they might be streaming proper 1080p if you have an HDCP-capable monitor, I don’t know.
For me, it’s a really bad experience. They’re just giving me 480p in Firefox, regardless of the operating system used.
Nah, if it was 480p, I would notice. I’m not 98 years old with cataracts.
Some people just don’t notice low resolution, don’t take this as a personal offence. :D
This is funny. I live in an area that’s pretty remote, and my internet speed is sometimes very shit, so I never realized I’m getting fucked on my picture quality by using firefox.
Have you tried a user-agent switcher? Trick their website into thinking you’re using Safari on MacOS?
I am not sure “mildly infuriating” is accurate in this case.
Apple is incompetent at writing software for anything but their own devices. iCloud Web is also a disaster for example, and the old iTunes for Windows is infamous for being a buggy mess. Though I have to say they did a good job with the new web Apple Maps.
They aren’t incompetent, they want people to think “wow this is horrible, it must be my windows PC - I need to buy a MacBook!”
Which is funny. I get MLS season pass with my season ticket. I had to jump through so many hoops just to ACTIVATE this free thing. You can’t just visit a website. You need an account with a credit card. You either use an Apple device or iTunes. You can’t use their app on any platform (even the one youre going to use to watch it) to activate. Big thing is you cant even get iTunes on Linux without a huge hassle and wine. This isn’t even getting into that the android mobile app wasn’t even released till this year, like three years in.
The whole experience convinced me to NEVER buy anything Apple.
It is definitely a stupid strategy. I have a large iTunes library, and when they released the apple music app for windows a few years ago I tried switching over. Somehow the new app was even worse than iTunes, so I had to figure out how to switch everything back. At the same time I tried installing the iCloud app for PC - that may be literally the worst piece of software I have had the displeasure of using. It installed a bunch of services on my PC, added itself to the file explorer, and then failed to let me log into my account. That was also fun to figure out how to completely remove.
Maybe it is working again now… I have no real desire to test it again. Clearly they released these applications (after years of complaints) knowing that they weren’t functional, or possibly without any testing whatsoever. Overall it is a laughable effort from a company with a budget as large as Apple’s.
Too bad, it makes me think “wow this is horrible, if they are this bad at developing a simple app I don’t want to find out how bad they would be at developing and maintaining a whole OS…”
I always thought this was intentional. Apple TV doesn’t make them money, but it’s a gateway drug for you to completely move over to their ecosystem
Thanks for the recommendation of For All Mankind , never heard of it. Looks good.
Daddy Apple treat you like a child. 😉
Yarr !, my experience has been stellar ;) (Gaben: It’s a service problem…)
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What do you watch it on?
TV.
Did you catch that the OP was watching on a computer?
The OPs experience is on a computer, so your experience with a TV doesn’t contradict their experience.
No contradiction implied.
Which what type of device? He’s talking about a Windows PC. I’m sure on the Apple TV device Apple TV+ works just fine.
Nvidia Shield and Roku.
I’m not the OC, btw.
It probably works fine if you use an Apple device, although people have run into the aged-restricted content not playing on MacOS, too.
Foundation is pretty excellent as well.
I go with the path of least resistance for top quality. I don’t think a subscription can give you this.
As per usual, Apple heavily prefers its own hardware and software. Using the TV app on my Mac the image quality of Apple TV+ blows all the other streaming services out of the water, but in the browser it’s a blurry, buffering mess 🤷♂️
My guess is they throw these Windows projects at summer interns.
Most likely the people using a windows browser to watch ATV+ is a minuscule percentage and doesn’t warrant the cost of implementing and maintaining a proper solution
